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Two People's Faces, Cracked and Fractured
by K. Rose Miller
We were children frolicking in the countryside, picking flowers and weaving them
into garlands. You made me wear all the garlands, piled on as crowns and necklaces.
I would have objected if I had known what our father would do if he saw you
wearing one. We stayed out there until the sun was close to the horizon and Nana
called us in for dinner. She made me leave the garlands outside. Sometimes I
snuck one in under my shirt and pressed it in a Bible until it was flat and dry.
You never saw it. We slept in separate rooms.
Garlands of flattened flowers, framed and protected in layers of glass, decorate
the walls of my apartment now. They’re all new, painstakingly gathered from my
little garden, and pressed in a Riverside Chaucer, the heaviest book I own. When
men come to take me out to dinner I tell them I’m an artist. The ones that
encourage me I end up never seeing again. They don’t know the truth, after all.
They only see something attractive, and a hope. I never invite them in. Not on
the first date.
*
We took long walks through the woods with our mother and, sometimes on weekends,
our father. I climbed trees and swung on vines. Mother wouldn’t let you—not
because she cared if your dress got dirty, as you thought, but because it wasn’t
ladylike. I wanted you to join me, but I knew it wasn’t supposed to be that way.
Mother carried a picnic basket, and we ate lunch on boulders by the creek. You and
I threw crumbs to the ducks.
We should have strewn them on the path that would lead us to each other.
The woman who keeps me asks me to paint trees sometimes. They are monstrous,
garish green, shadowed and always hiding something. She displays them or sells
them. Her friends say they’re the softest of my pieces. They don’t see the things
I paint only for myself. Art critics say they’re harsh and deformed (but they
still come to the shows in droves). They don’t see the things I paint for her.
*
I learned to read several months before you did. Our mother was upset about that
development, but our father laughed. It showed you were a red-blooded American
boy, not concerned with abstract things, just what was real and tangible, he said.
(I had to look up “tangible.”) Besides, you could recite more psalms than I could. He stopped laughing when he realized that you were spending your time on pictures and drawing instead of baseball and Jesus.
I learned to write on my own, too. The first word I taught myself to scrawl was
not my name, but yours. “Hunter,” I wrote across the pages of a stenographer’s
notebook stolen from Father’s office. “Hunter,” I wrote in the corners of your drawings for you. You beamed at me.
Now I sit alone and write. I have an old typewriter that I bang at for hours on
end until my fingers are sore. I stuff every haphazard page into the cardboard
boxes tucked under my bed. There’s no one to look at it all, anyway. My papers for school are written on the quiet, relaxing keyboards of library computers.
*
When we were ten and eleven our parents hired a math tutor for us. Father didn’t
want to pay for lessons for you as well, but Mother insisted that being held back for failing math would be socially catastrophic for you. Not that it mattered, anyway.
Science we never had a problem with. There was always something, at least, for me
to draw. I failed math my senior year of high school because I didn’t need it to
graduate, so I didn’t try. You were always a better student than me.
I feel vaguely validated that, like I always said, math isn’t necessary for
anything—I don’t need it, anyway. I just spend my time painting and let others
worry about the money. As long as I have paints and canvases, and enough food and
drink that I don’t faint from hunger or thirst, I’m fine. That is all I want in life.
*
I cut my hair off when I was twelve. It was past my waist and still growing, and I
hated it. I cut it to my chin. You helped me, evening it up in the back. When
Mother made me go without dessert for a month I didn’t tell her about your part in
it. You snuck me bits of squashed cake from your pockets, then ran back to your
room before Nana caught you. I thought the haircut was awful, but you told me it was adorable, and when it kept mysteriously getting trimmed instead of growing out, Mother gave up and took me to a salon to get a real style.
I’ve never let my hair grow past my shoulders again. It’s been shaved (for a
semester in college), short and dyed blue, shoulder-length and hennaed red for two
years, and everything in between. I got the most attention when it was long. Now
it’s chin-length again, my natural mousy brown with blonde highlights and reddish
lowlights. I need to do something different with it. I can’t afford the salon
visits to keep it up anymore. And besides, I’m getting antsy. It’s been too long since it changed.
*
The day I turned eighteen I got a tattoo. I picked you up from St. Octavia’s
(which let out a half an hour after Cardinal Truscello—I never could figure out
what you girls did with the extra time) and we drove to the mall. I let you go
into the CD store for a while, but you came back out without buying anything and we
went to the tattoo place. We must have spent an hour looking through the different
tattoo designs. I finally decided on a skull and crossbones for my bicep. “A
pirate,” you said, grinning.
When you weren’t paying attention I told the chick doing the tattoo that I wanted
my girlfriend’s name in script underneath it. She smiled, her lip piercing scraping against her teeth, and said that was sweet.
“What is her name?”
“Sarah,” I said.
Cora makes sure I keep the tattoo covered most of the time. It’s too
teenage-rebel, she says. I’m not that. I’m a tortured artist. That’s my image.
I ask her if I should get a new tattoo, and she says if I want. I don’t ask her
what it should be. I know she wants her name. I don’t ask if she wants the skull
and crossbones removed. It may be possible, but I won’t do it. I’d rather cover up.
*
I went to visit you. You let me in. She wasn’t home. You looked thinner than
before, gaunt, dressed in an (I thought) uncharacteristic black turtleneck. I
can’t blame you for dressing that way, though. It was cold in that house. We sat
down and had tea on fine, feminine china. We were barely talking. I just sat
there, sipping tea and nibbling on a biscuit, staring at you. There was a painting
on the wall behind you—two faces, an abstract of some sort, maybe Cubism—I don’t know my art well. They were shattered into pieces, it seemed, eyes pointing in five different directions. The woman had mouse-brown hair but green eyes. Her
face was unrecognizable. The man looked like you.
You moved between me and the painting and caught my gaze. I looked down at my tea.
“Why are you here?” you asked.
“To rescue you,” I said.
“I don’t need rescuing,” you said.
I don’t like unlined notebooks, but I have a few anyway, gifts from people who just
know I like journals. In the morning sometimes I pick up one of those notebooks
and try to draw two faces, not realistic, just whatever I can coax out of my
pencil. I can’t do it. It always comes out love.
*
You visited me once. I was alone. I made tea. I felt like I couldn’t recognize
you. Were your eyes always that blue? I thought, I didn’t have them right, in my paintings.
I could see that you were uncomfortable being there. I asked why you had come.
“To rescue you,” you said.
After you left, I painted for six straight hours. I tore up the paintings. They
weren’t right. I needed more colors.
I think maybe you’re the one who needs rescuing.
*
Our parents wanted you to go to college and me to get married. I’d say the
opposite happened, but you’re not married to her. At least Mother was happy (for
once in my life) with the degree I’m getting and what I’m planning to do with it.
English is a useless major, Father said, but now I’m in grad school for library
science and she’s happy. “Librarian is a nice career,” she said. Then I shaved my head.
I considered getting a tattoo on the bald white expanse, but I’m not that brave. I
remember how you gritted your teeth when you had yours done. I can’t deal with
pain. You’re better at that sort of thing than me.
Sometimes when I see men with skull-and-crossbones tattoos I flirt with them and
call them pirates. Nothing else ever happens. They don’t have my name written beneath the bones.
*
I would have gone to college if life had worked that way. Anything to improve my art. You understood that. You may not have had a similar passion in your life, but you always understood it.
But I never had to go to college—or perhaps I should say I didn’t have the
opportunity. Instead Cora found me. She saw my paintings and declared me an
Artist and started to show them to rich people and art critics, and I moved in with
her. And I’ve never left.
I still haven’t gotten used to this place. There are three floors and more rooms
than I’ve seen before in a single building in my life, except for museums. It is a
museum, or it seems that way at first—she does it on purpose. Not all of the art
on the walls is mine. It seems that every week I turn a corner and there’s a room
I’ve never seen before. It seems that every week I try a door and it’s locked.
I can’t remember how long it’s been since I last went outside.
*
We played house and had tea parties. Nana thought it was sweet and poured us milk
for our teacups. Mother tolerated it until we started to act like her and our father. You said our games should be more realistic. I kissed you. Our mother shrieked and pulled us apart. We were never allowed to play house again.
My bathroom mirror is broken. Seven years’ bad luck.
*
We played house and had tea parties. Instead of tea we had milk that Nana poured
for us. I thought, we should act like a real married couple. I told you our games
weren’t realistic enough. We were seven and eight. You kissed me.
I see faces in my dreams, cracked and fractured.
*
On your first day of high school a girl asked you out on a date. Before you
agreed, you asked my permission. I gave it. I didn’t think you really liked her.
You didn’t, either. She did.
I’ve never met the woman you live with. I imagine she’s beautiful.
*
I spent all month trying to find you a date for your junior prom. When no one
would take you I broke a date I had that night and went with you myself. I don’t
think I’ve ever seen you happier than that night. I hope you have been, even if it
had to be when I wasn’t there to see it.
I haven’t been. |
